Making Sense of the New Blackberry Phone Running Android

A BlackBerry phone is slated to launch later this year and it is just as weird as anything can be. Right since the very first picture of the device was leaked we got the impression that BlackBerry has tried to bring the BlackBerry Torch back. A smartphone with a full touch screen and slide out keyboard below that is always going to be an idea that would really interest very few. We saw HTC failing with the likes of HTC Desire Z and HTC Chacha in their attempt to combine touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. BlackBerry may have had little success with the likes of Q10, but their poor pricing has let them down. So, what is it that the new BlackBerry phone brings?

The BlackBerry device leaked is perhaps the largest device we have seen with a full QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen combination. The way this is supposed to work is that the keyboard slides out from the bottom of the device and if you want to keep the keyboard not retracted, the phone behaves like a thick touchscreen phone. If you like to type long E-Mails this keyboard is really a boon and will save you a lot of mistakes that you tend to make on a touchscreen because you could not differentiate between the characters. On the other hand, it will make the phone really bulky and heavy. From the leaked images, it is pretty clear that the phone comes with premium chassis, and with metal most likely to form a major chunk of it, you are definitely looking at a phone well above say 180 grams.

We would definitely have liked BlackBerry to have come up with a solution like Typo did for the iPhone, where the keyboard in itself can be an accessory and not a component of the phone itself. That is a market that BlackBerry can dominate seeing their expertise with keyboards and vouching for a fact that the Blackberry Bold keyboards were easily the best we have used in our time.

The new BlackBerry phone is supposed to run Android in Vanilla stage but we really hope that some of the cool things that BlackBerry did with BB OS 10, like peek, hub etc which were really good are brought on board. The display seems to have two curved edges, and that is again something that while has been implemented, has not really taken off and would be interesting to see if BlackBerry is able to pull a rabbit out of the hat and bring something extraordinary here.

It has pretty much been confirmed that the new BlackBerry phone will be called BlackBerry Priv. Now that is a name that definitely does not slip out of the tongue very easily, and on really thinking hard, we feel that it may be a short for Privacy or Privilege or Private or anything else. We hope there is an explanation to that name else we can so see the ‘Perv’ trolls coming. On the specs front, the phone is expected to come with Snapdragon 808 with 3 GB RAM and a QHD 5.4 inch display. The rear camera is expected to be 18 MP (A Schneider-Kreuznach lens) capable of 4K video recording while the front camera is a 5 MP sensor. There is also a front facing speaker grille so we assume the phone will be really loud for listening to music or getting on to conference calls.

The rumors point towards a launch in November in the US, so we could expect a fully unlocked version by the end of the year here in India.